Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Thansgivukkah, holiday mashup: “Home cooks have been doing that for centuries, and this year’s supercollider is an invitation to make something new that lasts.”

But on Nov. 28, there will be three candles ready in the menorah by the time the turkey leaves the wood fire. (Hanukkah starts on Wednesday at sundown, so depending on how long this meal lasts, we’ll probably be lighting candles for the second night around the time the pie comes out.)

The challenge this year is to serve a meal that honors our traditions, makes room for fresh influences from our grown sons (both home cooks) and blends the best of both holiday menus into one epic feast. For help, we turned to the Dining section’s own Melissa Clark, who picked out the most promising notes in our family cookbooks and developed recipe combinations that pulled the meal together.

She suggested we add fresh horseradish to the matzo balls, a perfect nod to David’s grandfather, who liked to carve bits tableside from a huge, gnarly root. So festive. It was also Melissa’s idea to serve our Hanukkah brisket next to the turkey, as if she knew that David’s grandmother always served two kinds of meat at every holiday, a subconscious demonstration of abundance by a Holocaust survivor who understood privation.

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We won’t be the only family crowding into the kitchen this year, mixing holiday flavors and inventing new customs on our feet. Home cooks have been doing that for centuries, and this year’s supercollider is an invitation to make something new that lasts. But not cranberry sauce with raisins.

NANJING, China—China is famous for its warp speed of construction. The Sifang project near this ancient capital in southern China is a study in the opposite.

The construction of 24 uniquely designed buildings by various architects on 115 acres of land has been slow and extremely deliberate, even though 1 billion yuan (US$164 million) has been spent to date. So deliberate, in fact, that when this design fantasyland opens to visitors Saturday, only 11 of those 24 structures will be complete—a decade after the architects submitted their designs.

Scaffolding covers the recreation center, designed by late Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. Only foundations have been laid for a house by 2010 Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese duo Sanaa. Even some of the houses that are “finished” still appear to be missing details like electrical outlets.

China’s wealthy patrons like Mr. Lu’s family are underwriting a major cultural boom, spending billions of yuan on grand buildings to showcase impressive collections of art, antiques and other cultural rarities. Their largesse and ambitions echo American industrialists who sponsored the arts in the early years of the 20th century… — online.wsj.com

Recently in The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jason Chow interviewed real-estate developer Lu Jun and his son Lu Xun who finally opened the Sifang Art Museum for its first exhibition this past weekend in Nanjing, China after 10 years of construction.

Spearheaded by Lu Jun and curated by architects Liu Jiakun and Arato Isozaki, the $164 million project consists of 11 mixed-use buildings designed by an international mix of well-known architects including Wang Shu, SANAA, David Adjaye, Mathias Klotz, Steven Holl, and artist Ai Weiwei (the only non-architect). Three more buildings are expected to be completed within the next year.

During a rising cultural trend of private museums owned by China\’s wealthiest patrons, Lu Jun, his son, and some of the museum’s architects describe the doubts, challenges, and hopes in the construction and operation of the ambitious project.

“Without money from the property development, how do you support the art? It’s unfair to judge us that way,” Mr. Lu said. “We’re not flipping art.”

U.K. art consultant Philip Dodd, who has organized private-museum forums in recent years to gather China’s budding patrons, says art museums have long been tied to the large egos and profits of businessmen, pointing to Andrew Mellon, the U.S. financier who died in 1937 and whose art collection was donated to establish the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

“I wouldn’t over-moralize this,” Mr. Dodd says. “Museums are often set up with sugar money.”

U.S. Postal Service, Amazon packages , Sunday delivery, latimes.com: Interesting. I’d like to see the numbers.

Giant online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is turning up the heat on rivals this holiday season and beyond under a new deal with the U.S. Postal Service for delivering packages on Sundays.

Starting this week, the postal service will bring Amazon packages on Sundays to shoppers’ doors in the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas at no extra charge. Next year, it plans to roll out year-round Sunday delivery to Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix and other cities.

Getting packages on Sundays normally is expensive for customers. United Parcel Service Inc. doesn\’t deliver on Sundays, according to a spokeswoman. And FedEx Corp. said Sunday \”is not a regular delivery day,\” though limited options are available.

The deal could be a boon for the postal service, which has been struggling with mounting financial losses and has been pushing to limit general letter mail delivery to five days a week.

The postal service’s Sunday package delivery business has been very small, but the arrangement with Amazon for two of the retailer’s larger markets, Los Angeles and New York, should boost work considerably.

To pull off Sunday delivery for Amazon, the postal service plans to use its flexible scheduling of employees, Brennan said. It doesn’t plan to add employees, she said.

Members of Amazon’s Prime program have free two-day shipping and, under the new deal, can order items Friday and receive them Sunday. Customers without Prime will pay the standard shipping costs associated with business day delivery.

Who would have thought traveling to outer space could be such a profound experience? OK, probably everybody, but these former astronauts really articulate it in a way that was just a little mind-blowing.

“Life’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence one’s heart first opened.” ~ Albert Camus

On a recent trip to Serenbe, one of my favorite retreat spots in the Atlanta area, I walked the labyrinth. I remember feeling a paradoxical sense of peace and power, when I finally surrendered my need to ‘get’ some earth shattering insights.

Labyrinths are truly sacred places. The design itself is ancient, some say more than 4,000 years old. It combines the sacred geometry of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path.

The ritual of walking the labyrinth silences the intellect and awakens your deep, intuitive nature. Walking a labyrinth is a metaphor for life’s journey, you will often discover parallels between your ‘walk’ and how you move about in the world. As you navigate this sacred space, it awakens and activates your own sacred blueprint.

The labyrinth invokes your intuition, creativity, and imagination. It is an invitation to adventure to the core of your Essence and come back to the world with an expanded experience of who you are.

Black Friday, Holiday shopping, Thanksgiving: I would love to say I would do this, but even in the 70s I spent thanksgiving shopping. We would take all our holiday catalogs to Pineview and turn down the corners all afternoon. So, since I already shop on-line on Thanksgiving, I guess I can’t begrudge the brick and mortar stores for trying to get me back. Well, I can, actually.

J.C. Penney now joining Macy’s and other stores that plan to open on Thanksgiving Day, prompting this pledge to circulate. No way do I want to shop that day – but maybe a lot of people will. What’s your position on this?

Add Macy’s to the list of retailers kicking off “Black Friday” and Thanksgiving Thursday.

Macy’s will open the doors at most of its 800 namesake department stores, at 8 p.m. on Nov. 28. The company said the shift was voluntary for workers and that the move was “consistent with what many rivals are doing.

Traditionally, retailers have waited until Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving, to start their end-of-the-year push for sales.

U.S. retailers have extended their hours on Black Friday, so named because it’s when most stroes go into the black, in recent years to get a jump on the holiday season sales.

Georgia’s value to the SEC increased thanks to playing in the Outback Bowl, which brought $3.5 million in bowl revenue into the conference. The Bulldogs may see another bump in revenue next year thanks to hosting the Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate rivalry game against Georgia Tech and playing in the SEC Championship this season.

Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas Series, kith/kin, bookshelf: We now won the entire series. I haven’t decided whether I will join my spouse in this marathon reading s.ession.

“Although I once resolved that I would never write a series character, I have now written six full-length novels and one short novel featuring Odd Thomas, a young fry cook who sees the spirits of the dead that are reluctant to pass over to the Other Side. I have also said that I 1 would not eat another cookie until I lose five pounds; 2 would never again buy magazines I dont want from cute neighborhood tykes selling them to raise money for a school trip; 3 would never tweet on Twitter; 4 would never wear a baseball cap with a funny message on it — but I have done all those things. The message on my baseball cap is “In dog years, Im dead.” I am as unlikely to keep a resolution as Wile E. Coyote is unlikely ever to catch the Road Runner.

Karen Armstrong, prayer, shame, The History of God, bookshelf: OK, Several of her books have been on my reading list for quite a while, The History of God, in particular. It appears she has a bit of a sense of humor, so I will move them up.

While at the convent, one of Armstrong’s struggles was almost unheard of for a nun, as she tells Oprah in this video from “Super Soul Sunday.” Armstrong says she developed an inability to pray and couldn’t seem to do anything to focus herself on prayer.

“I was completely unable to pray, which is a bit of a drawback for a nun,” Armstrong tells Oprah. “When I used to go in to make my meditation every morning, off my mind went, down every skittering kind of alley and byway. This was a source of terrible shame.”

When Armstrong told her superior that she could no longer pray, she was brushed off. “She said, ‘Oh, Sister, you’re always so dramatic. Everybody has an off day,'” Armstrong recalls.

But, for Armstrong, being a nun who couldn’t pray was much more than that. “A nun is nothing except the quality of her prayer,” she explains. “My prayer was so bad, it was off the charts.”

The Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter’s home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.[22]

On the road again … And the seats are definitely more comfortable on the MegaBus than on Spirit Air!

Except for the 30 minute delay for a “random” Georgia Department of Public Safety inspection, this has been a delightful MegaBus ride. I am reading a Kindle book that I downloaded years ago, How the Irish Saved Civilization. It is way over my head.

How the Irish Saved Civilization, bookshelf, Kindle: One of the great things about reading on Kindle is that you are able to electronically save your highlights … DENNARD shared from How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History) by Thomas Cahill

We did lose, at any rate, the spirit of classical civilization. “At certain epochs,” wrote Kenneth Clark in Civilisation, “man has felt conscious of something about himself—body and spirit—which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection—reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium.

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From the fourth century on, instruction in Christianity could even serve as a shortcut to Romanization, as joining the Episcopalians was till recently a shortcut to respectability in America.

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Roman Christians assumed this prejudice without examining it. Augustine, in his profundity, realized that the ahistorical Platonic ascent to Wisdom through knowledge and leisured contemplation was unaccomplishable and that it must be replaced by the biblical journey through time—through the life of each man and through the life of the

Antonia Larroux, RIP, Obituary, NY, bookshelf, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries: An obit worth reading if you are into that sort of thing. I obviously am …

Antonia W. “Toni” Larroux Bay St. Louis, MS Waffle House lost a loyal customer on April 30, 2013. Antonia W. “Toni” Larroux died after a battle with multiple illnesses: lupus, rickets, scurvy,

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Anyone wearing black will not be admitted to the memorial. She is not dead. She is alive.

And now I have a new book on my list: The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. Thanks, Paul!

Brandon Plantation, For Sale, Thomas Jefferson-Designed, Virginia Manor House: If you buy it, I will come visit! I like the style fine … but it looks remarkably similar to the Lawn at UVA. Oh, wait, Mr. Jefferson designed that one, too.

Brandon Plantation, a designated National Historic Landmark, hits the auction block June 26, only the third time it’s changed hands since the colonization of Jamestown in 1607.

The 4,487-acre property includes a 7-bed, 6.5-bath Palladian-style main house that was “substantially” designed by Jefferson (whose most famous architectural feat, Monticello, lies 120 miles away).

Fields at Brandon, the “oldest continuous agricultural operation in the U.S.,” continue to produce corn (189 bushels per acre in 2012), wheat (78 bushels) and soybeans (50 bushels). The property also includes six square formal gardens, a swimming pool, tennis courts and two river cottages.

Let me be clear that respecting younger generations does not have to come at the cost of disregarding the older generations. As the church of Jesus Christ in twenty-first century America, we have enough challenges ahead of us, such as cultural, economic, and ecclesial battles to name a few. We do not need to add generational battles too. We are all in this together, and we should start acting like it. We may have differing ideas about worship styles and clerical garb, sermon prep practices and models for ministry, but when it comes down to it, we are all for the same thing – to worship and serve the Lord. And there’s no minimum or maximum age for that.

John Kasay, retirement, Carolina Panther , CharlotteObserver.com: A very nice and very deserved gesture!

John Kasay stands with members of his family as team owner Jerry Richardson speaks on Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at Bank of America Stadium. Kasay a kicker signed a one-day contract with the Carolina Panthers so that he could retire as a Panther.